In his autobiography The Good Life, rapper Trip Lee describes the impact that certain songs and albums had on him while he was growing up. Lee says that while he may have listened to “the clean version” of these songs, which removed foul language from the lyrics, he wasn’t protected from the way the songs promoted materialism and promiscuity. Lee writes, “There is no edited version that removes worldviews… They were lecturing me about what my aspirations should be and what is most important in the world… If I wanted the good life, I needed the money, the cars and the girls.”
What we consume influences us. The ideas we see, hear, and engage with can shape our beliefs and our perspectives. Sometimes, without even processing or thinking about them, we accept these ideas as our own. As Professor Nancy Pearcey puts it in her book Love Thy Body, “The most powerful worldviews are the ones we absorb without knowing it. They are the ideas nobody talks about—the assumptions we pick up almost by osmosis.”
Media can be defined as any tool that uses our senses to deliver a message. Whether we mindlessly consume it, carefully learn from it, or try to totally ignore it, media shapes and influences our lives. Media literacy is about applying a critical eye and approach to the media we engage with—everything from music, movies, and video games to statistics, news articles, and advertisements.
Even though younger generations are often perceived as less gullible than generations who grew up before the internet, the reality is that media literacy can be an equal opportunity struggle. A Stanford study published in 2019 found that:
- Just over half of high school students took a faked video at face value, with only three (out of over 3,000) actually searching for the source of said video.
- Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and ads on the same website.
- 96% of students did not consider how a conflict of interest could slant a website’s coverage.
Media literacy is about becoming more discerning consumers of media—but it’s also about understanding the unique mediums that bring us that content, and how those inform the messages we absorb. In his book The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan argued that, “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
Throughout this series, we’ll examine several different types of mediums (or “media”) and discuss how to deepen our media literacy. We’ll share tips for how to become more discerning with AI, social media, news, statistics, music, movies, video games, and so much more. But before we do that, let’s get started by understanding a couple of key principles of media literacy.
This course is a collaboration between Axis and The Pour Over, a politically neutral, Christ-first news source.